


The Devil You Know

by shnuffeluv



Category: Sanders Sides (Web Series)
Genre: 100 Themes Challenge, Autistic Deceit | Janus Sanders, Brainwashing, Child Abuse, Child Neglect, Gen, Isolation, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Rejection, Religious Cults, Sexual Assault, Trans Male Deceit | Janus Sanders, vent fic
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-27
Updated: 2021-02-28
Packaged: 2021-03-18 13:01:07
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,556
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29734257
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shnuffeluv/pseuds/shnuffeluv
Summary: Alternate Title: A Vent About Why I Find Dreams About Going to Hell And Chilling With Lucifer Comforting100 vignettes on assorted themes from a predetermined list. With any luck, I'll be able to nail all 100 just going over things I need to vent about.
Comments: 3
Kudos: 14





	1. Introduction

**Author's Note:**

> Last warning before you open this: the story is not rated. I chose not to use archive warnings. You can't get salty at me for anything I put in here.

He calls himself Deceit. Others might not always be amused by this nickname, or they may outright hate it, but in his mind, that's who he is. He has lied, time and time again, to everyone surrounding him. He's lied to his parents. To his brother. To himself, for so many years he barely knows who he is anymore. So he calls himself Deceit. Much easier to get the disliking to be done at the head, you see, rather than wait for someone to get attached to him, give him false hope, and inevitably drop him for something he can't exactly help.

His real name is Janus. He was a child once, too. A child who was forced into dresses as a young boy, told simply that he had to wear them when he'd ask why. They'd go to church, and he'd be forced to sit in a pew starting at age four. He wasn't allowed to have his legs spread, or crisscrossed at all, which distressed him greatly. Did his parents not understand that he was more comfortable sitting that way?

They understood. They just didn't care. He was forced to sit with his legs closed because of those stupid dresses which hid nothing below the knee, uncomfortable and wanting to be anywhere else when the prayers were said, because he had to be quiet and good especially then. He hated the prayers, they made him uncomfortable and he was always told to close his eyes but that made him feel even worse. He didn't understand then, but closing his eyes made him feel unsafe. Closing his eyes for fifteen or twenty minutes at a time? Unacceptable.

He was a child who was different. He'd enjoy walking on his toes, or having his arms in odd positions, or sucking his thumb long past the acceptable age to be doing that. He had family who was neurodivergent; his grandmother and two uncles on his mom's side, and probably his mother herself, though she refused diagnosis. His grandfather and even his dad were also neurodivergent. And yet, they would deny any neurodivergency from him. He suspected that for years, never allowed to explore what it might mean, all because his flavor of neurodivergent was not ADHD, but Autism.

He had memories starting at the young age of six, stimming to himself by flicking his toes in his shoes at school. He loved some textures, and hated others. This was normal, he was informed. Was it normal to spend hours petting one texture while no other thoughts ran in your head simply because it felt nice, he wanted to demand. But he couldn't demand that. To demand that would be acting out, and he wanted so desperately to be good.

He wanted to be good for years and years, and got no reward for it, beyond getting to keep his comfort objects at home. This, for a time, was enough for him. After all, if he was bad, those comfort objects were stolen from him, placed on high shelves he could see put couldn't reach, as an example of what happened were he to be bad.

According to others, he shouldn't be so worldly as to rely on material objects for comfort. But this was one thing he was always going to be "bad" at. After all, he needed to comfort himself some way. His parents certainly weren't going to do that for him. And stuffed animals always felt so soft, and you could hug them and they'd have a pleasant _squish_ to them. It was a small piece of guaranteed comfort wherever he went with a stuffed animal.

But he grew up. And things that were once acceptable for self-soothing became less so. Sucking his thumb was gaining him odd looks by kindergarten. And by the third grade, he was terrified of admitting he still collected stuffed animals. How was he supposed to admit that, when all his peers were obsessed with Pokémon, and whatever boy band was playing on the radio? How did he explain that he listened to the radio, but only three stations, and those were the ones his parents had vetted to make sure they had no bad words whatsoever on them, including the world "Hell"? And when that got old, he would listen to the CDs he had that he enjoyed. The few that he could stand to have on loop for hours on end, because the radio grew boring, with five songs instead of five albums.

There was no way to explain that without feeling like a social outcast. So when he was confronted about his lack of modern music knowledge, he just said he didn't listen to the radio that much. He was honest. And the other kids laughed in his face, throwing his words back in his face. They gave him examples of the choruses of other songs, and he found them rather...boring. He had never heard some of them before but he certainly didn't like them very much, just based on the three words that made up the entirety of the chorus.

But he was isolated from his peers anyway, sheltered away without much he could do about it. There was nothing he wanted more than to fit in somewhere, and he was easy prey for the church to manipulate. It was easy, they said, to go to Heaven. Everyone belonged if they went to Heaven. And all you had to do was accept Jesus into your heart. However, if you didn't accept Jesus, you were sent to Hell for eternity. The church painted this as a good thing. Keep the sinners away from those who had been forgiven.

Janus was horrified. As a child, and even as he grew up, he had friends who were Jewish, who were atheists, who didn't believe in God or believed that all religions were wrong or right to a degree. He didn't want to see them go to Hell! He tried to evangelize his friends, in a desperate attempt to make sure they would be with him whenever he went to Heaven. The few friends he had were important to him, almost more than his stuffed animals were.

But they refused his attempts, and he didn't know what to do. How was he supposed to be happy going to a place where he had no friends except the few he'd had tenuous connections with in Sunday School? How did he reconcile that sinners were all bad and evil with the friends he had at school?

So he built up that shell around himself. He started calling himself Deceit. It was so much easier to simply...not get attached to someone than to deal with the ramifications of not seeing them ever again after they died. It was so much safer to keep his connections to a minimum. That was how he kept himself safe. That was how he distanced himself enough to accept that most people would wind up going to Hell. And that's what he did, for years and years. Janus was no more. It was time to face facts. If he wanted to be safe, he couldn't be Janus, the quirky introvert who was too attached to material things for his own good. He had to be Deceit, who loved concepts, ideals, things that couldn't be taken away from him as easily as friends or things could. He built that shell around himself and forced himself to accept it.

His name was Janus. But using his name wasn't something he was ever comfortable with. So he decided that instead, he would call himself what he did the most: lying to everyone, even himself.


	2. Chapter 2

When Deceit was little, he learned that love was conditional. Love would always claim to be impartial, to be whatever you needed it to be. But there was always, _always_ a catch. God loved you, but he could take away the things that brought you comfort and safety at a moment's notice. Your parents loved you, and that's why they hit you in order to get you to follow their rules. There was no other explanation, no mention of abuse. Anything that someone did to you was either out of love, or out of evil, and no one could _ever_ lie about what their intention was.

Deceit trusted the black and white. It was easier than the shades of gray he saw the world in. After all, if he could reduce it to black and white, he could disconnect himself from the problems that he had with the teachings. His parents loved him. That's why they hit him. That's why they yelled. That's why they punished him. That's why...that's why they left him alone if he got too worked up. That's why they ignored his very obvious meltdowns.

Love was conditional. It would say it wasn't, but that was a lie. That was okay though, because...

...Because why? Why would love lie about being conditional? Only the evil lied, didn't they?

Love was conditional. And the church said as much. You had to ask for forgiveness for being born, for wanting things that were not yours when you cried as a baby for food, for something to drink, for your parents' warmth. Those needs were sinful. The church said as much. And God loved you. That's why he would send you to Hell if you didn't ask for forgiveness. It followed the same logic of Mommy and Daddy hitting you when you were bad when you were really little. Love was conditional. Love was unconditional. God was love. God would abandon you if you weren't careful.

Which was the truth?

Deceit didn't focus on it. After all, God worked in mysterious ways. He didn't have to know the inner machinations of God's mind to know that it made sense somehow. He was just too small, too mortal, too human to understand it. God was love, and love was unconditional. Non-negotiable. Same with God. You couldn't get away from him, much as you might try. You couldn't get a better chance than the one God gave you. Non-negotiable. Unconditional. He could rip everything away from you at a moment's notice, out of love and care for you.

He ripped Deceit's footing out from him for as long as Deceit could remember. When it wasn't his parents, it was self-discovery. He was asexual. He liked boys. He _was_ a boy. He was an asexual boy who liked boys. And too many people had problems with that. Too many people wanted to "fix" him.

The first time he tried to make love, he failed so badly he bled for days. He was manipulated into it, but of course, love was unconditional, and this boy loved him. And if Deceit wanted that unconditional love, he would have to bite the bullet and let this boy touch him. Touch him in places he hadn't dared touch himself before, not in _that_ way. And it hurt. Oh, how it hurt. He screamed, he cried, begging for it to stop. He had panic attack after panic attack. And the unconditional love of this boy comforted him, wiped away his tears, told him it was okay.

But the next day, the boy touched him again.

Deceit wasn't an idiot. He knew that God's love was conditional, and he broke the conditions. He was doomed for Hell by accepting this boy's love. One unconditional love for another. That was how this worked, wasn't it? He could bounce between people who claimed they would love him forever. He could sit there and take anything they threw at him, so long as his faith in God was enough. After all, God's love was unconditional. And God pulled Deceit into the situation he was in out of love.

It wasn't a test. It was a testament to how much God loved him. God loved him so much that he let Deceit be manipulated into rape. Let him cry in his room night after night, nightmare after nightmare. No one to comfort him. That was how much God loved him.

Love was unconditional. When he told his parents, they loved him so much he consoled them, not the other way around. They loved him so much, his mother swore that she would kill the boy who touched him and ranted about how she understood how her friends felt when the same happened to their children. They loved him so much, they allowed him to drop out of college and get therapy. They loved him so much they insisted that he get fixed. Like he was broken.

He was always broken. The church said as much. You were broken, you asked God for forgiveness. You tried to do better. You broke again. Rinse. Repeat.

Deceit learned to make love by himself, to himself. That was another part of God's unconditional love he broke. But when he found out how to feel good, how to feel _something_ in the abyss of nothing, he latched onto it and refused to let it go. He loved the feeling, would chase it the nights he couldn't feel anything else.

He was no stranger to breaking unconditional love by now. He was old hat at it. He was used to it. It was something that he could always count on. Unconditionally, he would break unconditional love. It was non-negotiable. If he couldn't break the unconditional love, it was never unconditional to begin with.

Love was unconditional. Love would be taken away from you if you didn't appreciate it. After all, that's what unconditional meant.

He would stop making love to himself slowly but surely. He didn't deserve the love, not even from himself. And so he refused it. He refused all the unconditional love he was given, simply because there was no way that the love was truly unconditional. He was doing himself a favor by not accepting it.

Therapy wouldn't fix him. He suffers endlessly from the first time he made true love. Clearly, he didn't deserve that boy's unconditional love, so it was taken away from him, like always. That was simply how things worked.

He never deserved the unconditional love. So it became conditional, broke away from him. That was why he was hit. That was why he was raped. That was why when he decided he was a boy, and wanted to show who he really was, he stopped receiving love from his parents.

Such was life. Love was conditional. It was _always_ conditional. And one day, he would run out of people to get conditional love from. One day, he would never receive love again.

Would that day be a blessing, or a curse?

What would happen when he no longer had love? Would he shrivel away and die, no one to care for him? Or would he simply continue on, an empty husk of who he was? He knew he deserved that, but it was still a little mean. But that was love. Love was never nice. Love hurt so impossibly much. And love was something he would chase after.

Love was unconditional. And he would break all the conditions that came along with it anyway. Because he was Deceit. And Deceit never deserved anyone who loved him.

He didn't deserve it. So he never got it.

**Author's Note:**

> Comments will be moderated for my comfort and peace of mind. Before you ask, I'm probably not okay. I'm working on it, though.


End file.
